Hello hello, and welcome back to Line Sheet, where I’m putting the special back in specialty retail every Monday and Thursday.

Today, I’ve got loads of news and notes, as well as two stories all about relevance: one big company losing it, another tiny one gaining it. Are you reading this private email on someone else’s phone? Or, worse, are you being forwarded this email without paying? (We’re tracking you and will send the results to your childrens’ private school…) Anyway, don’t be tacky: just use my top-secret discount code LINESHEET to sign up.

Mentioned in this issue: Cami Téllez, Les Wexner, IDG Capital and Swedish denim, Steven Meisel, Martin Waters, Adore Me, Jockum Hallin, Diego Della Valle, I.T Group, Simeon Siegel, Parade, Greg Unis, Chris Black, Kirsten Dunst, Jessica Herschko, and many more…

• M&A Fashion Week: Is there a better runway than the entrance to the Allen & Co. conference at the Sun Valley Lodge? This year I noted Kering C.E.O. François-Henri Pinault in an army jacket (Balenciaga?) and white t-shirt, and Alice + Olivia’s Stacey Bendet Eisner (Michael Eisner’s daughter-in-law) in her own wacko designs (I guess?) and a 2023 Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama handbag. Best dressed was definitely Diane von Furstenberg and husband Barry Diller in printed scarves. And while she’s not on Getty Images like the others, I do hear that Inga Allemann, the wife of On Running founder David Allemann, is also making a splash as a chic person not wearing a branded vest.

  Looks aside, I’m really obsessed with Rob Speyer and Anne-Cecilie Speyer of the enormous real estate investment firm Tishman Speyer, who are currently behind Rockefeller Center’s makeover. The Speyers have very good taste, managing to convince a number of fabulous restaurateurs (the ladies behind King, the Frenchette guys, Ignacio) and youngish brands (McNally Jackson, Kule) to give Midtown a try. Do people hanging out around Rockefeller Plaza need so many bougie options? I hope so!

  Oh, and if you want the real deal on what’s happening inside, follow my Puck partner Dylan Byers, who’s reporting from the front lines in Idaho.

• Undead Brands: The London-based label The Vampire’s Wife, fronted by Suzy Cave (wife of musician Nick Cave) and backed by Jimmy Iovine and Liberty Ross, sent out an email yesterday formally announcing that it had settled its debt with the British government, a move “financed by existing investors.” Again, I cannot reiterate the banality of these sorts of predicaments—it’s tough to not constantly be in debt if you’re a small fashion brand—and it just so happens that everyone involved in this one is famous. Good luck to them!

• Attenzione Italian Fashion News!: Walter Chiapponi, the creative director of Della Valle family-owned Tod’s, is out after September. The news was first reported by Italy’s reigning scoop queen, WWD’s Luisa Zargani. This is notable for a few reasons. To start, most people liked what Chiapponi was doing, but it never hit hard. Was that his fault? Tod’s is one of those brands that has so much potential: the iconic driving moccasin remains a rich-person wardrobe staple, but doesn’t feel as current or essential as it should. (In the age of Succession, it should be top of mind.) It’s notoriously tough for shoe brands to become fashion brands—Salvatore Ferragamo, another independent, family-controlled label, has also struggled with this.

  Another thing to remember: Last year, C.E.O. Diego Della Valle and his family abandoned a planned buyout of the public company, which generates a billion dollars a year in sales from brands including Roger Vivier, Hogan, and Fay, that would allow it to go private. (They couldn’t round up 90 percent of the shares, which is what it would have taken.) Separately, Della Valle, a longtime LVMH board member, also owns Schiaparelli. After several attempts at relaunching the surrealist fashion house, it is the toast of Paris thanks to designer Daniel Roseberry.

And now for a few words on Our Legacy…

“There’s a solid relationship between price and quality,” Williams said, referring to the fact that Our Legacy is well-made (in places like Portugal), but priced more reasonably than designer-designer gear. For instance, a men’s crocheted button up in black is $265, compared to similar styles from Bode ($590) and Nili Lotan ($500, marked down from $1,250).

I’m calling for a moratorium on crocheted shirts after this summer, by the way, but the lesson here is that you can still make trendy clothes, mostly sell standards—jeans and t-shirts—and remain cool among a large subset of fashion obsessives. The brand’s well-under-$1,000 Camion boot, a sort of cross between a motorcycle and Chelsea boot, is a part of the uniform of (mostly) men who listen to Throwing Fits. “It’s eating Acne’s lunch” in the menswear space, one person said to me.

Well, maybe Acne’s smoothie: Our Legacy is still a relatively small business compared to that other Swedish denim line-turned-fashion brand, which generated about $285 million in 2021, according to BoF. I asked around and found out that Our Legacy made about $35 million in sales last year, and is profitable (Woohoo! Amazing news!), with sales nearly doubling over the last couple of years. Women’s, which launched in 2018, makes up about 35 percent of the business, and has picked up momentum over the past couple of seasons.

Acne, backed by the investment firm IDG Capital and BAPE owners I.T Group, is far slicker, positioning itself as the European version of an affordable luxury label. The likely goal, for Acne, best known these days for the emoji-esque smiley face icon sewn onto t-shirts and knitted caps, is to sell to a strategic group. They’ve moved beyond fashion-first consumers (the ones who know all the brands) and into tech-guy personal-shopper territory. Case in point: Acne opened a shop in notoriously retail-tricky San Francisco, where I’d be willing to bet most sales of upscale apparel are generated by people buying clothes for other people. Which is absolutely fine, by the way. (Capitalism!)

As for Our Legacy’s ambitions, these guys are fabric nerds who want to create “progressive stuff” that is wearable, too, according to co-founder Jockum Hallin, who I talked to while he was on a family vacation in Paris this week. (Thank you, Jockum, for taking my call.) He and his fellow co-founders, creative director Cristopher Nying and C.E.O. Richardos Klarén, credit a lot of their success in the U.S., in particular, to the embrace of those influential on the menswear scene, including podcast shock jocks Lawrence Schlossman and James Harris of the aforementioned Throwing Fits. “One shouldn’t underestimate the grassroots love that we have in the States,” Hallin said. “They are super funny guys, but they also have a good point of view.”

And while Our Legacy has taken the slow-and-steady approach so far, the founders are not opposed to ramping things up with investor capital. “When it makes sense, we’re going to be ready. We’re not in conversations, but obviously we’re getting approached steadily,” he said. “If the right opportunity arises, we’re not going to be shy.”

And now for the main event…

The thing about specialty retailers like Victoria’s Secret is that nobody stays on top for long. If they’re any good, they have their moment in the sun, then fade away, like Gap; or are revitalized decades later by a new generation, like Abercrombie & Fitch. Fashion is a trends-driven business, which churns even faster these days thanks to Zara and Amazon and Shein. If there’s one reason for Victoria’s Secret’s prolonged commercial dominance, it’s probably the technical difficulty of manufacturing underwire bras. Victoria’s Secret is a replenishment business first, a fashion business second, and that has served it well.

Typically, when a retail group begins to see declining sales, it will develop or acquire new brands to supplant its core product, like when Estée Lauder bought MAC in the late ’90s, when Gap launched Old Navy in 1994, or when J.Crew leaned on Madewell when the things got tough in the 2010s. Some of these transitions are by design, others happen whether the executives want them to or not. “Historically, a skill in retail management was knowing how to pass the baton,” Simeon Siegel, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, told me. “Portfolios are meant to capitalize or smooth out the volatility of retail life cycles.”

Victoria’s Secret is smaller than it once was—logging $6.3 billion in sales in 2022, down from its peak of $7.7 billion in 2015—but it’s far less profitable. (Operating income in 2022 was $566 million, down from $1.4 billion in 2015—and back then, that didn’t include the international business.)

The shrinkage helps explain, at least in part, why Victoria’s Secret has been in M&A mode. I’ve heard that Victoria’s Secret was recently in talks to acquire Parade, the direct-to-consumer underwear startup for Gen Z and founded by Gen Z. However, as of today, those talks are “99 percent dead,” according to people familiar with the conversations.

Alas, Victoria’s Secret doesn’t really need more sales, per se. Instead, it needs bigger profits, which requires customers to buy things at full price. And customers only buy things at full price if they think they’re worth it, either through earned media or marketing. Ask Skims, which uses similar tactics as peak-era Victoria’s Secret to attract consumers: get a world-class photographer (in the case of Skims, Steven Meisel) to shoot the hottest women in the world (many of whom used to be Victoria’s Secret Angels), and call it a day. (Of course it’s more complex than that—don’t @ me Kardashian Klan—but you know what I mean.)

Skims is too big to partner with Victoria’s Secret at this point—it doesn’t need Victoria’s Secret to grow. On the other hand, acquiring a fledgling brand like Parade could be mutually beneficial. On track to reach $75 million in annual sales this year, it’s smaller than Adore Me, but Parade is on the pulse: it uses diverse models in its marketing in a convincing way, it talks about sex in a convincing way, it collaborates with brands younger consumers care about (Target, Ganni).

Why did talks fall apart, then? I was told that Victoria’s Secret suggested to Parade that the timing wasn’t right; the group’s available cash is limited by all the money it plans on spending on marketing around the relaunch of the fashion show this fall. (We’re talking tens of millions of dollars.) I reached out to both Victoria’s Secret and Parade for comment. A spokesperson for Victoria’s Secret said that the company does not comment on rumors or speculation. Parade C.E.O. and founder Cami Téllez, who has frequently contrasted her company’s ethos with Victoria’s Secret point of view, declined to comment.

In my opinion, though, Victoria’s Secret needs Parade just as much as Parade needs Victoria’s Secret, and maybe more. As I mentioned previously, Victoria’s Secret has been losing mindshare, and at least some market share, since the early 2010s. Chantal Fernandez, my co-author on the book, recently pulled up a stunning chart from 2015 citing research by Morgan Stanley—first published by the trade journal Columbus Business First—breaking down the Victoria’s Secret group’s sales, including Pink and Beauty. At that time, sales of Victoria’s Secret were $2.7 billion, not including beauty and swim, equal to Pink’s intimates and clothing sales combined. Sure, Victoria’s Secret still sold more bras, but Pink was closing in—even with far less distribution in stores.

The narrative perpetuated by mid-level L Brands executives at the time was that Victoria’s Secret wanted to hide Pink’s success to reinforce the strength of the master brand. But I was recently told by a former high-level Victoria’s Secret executive that Wexner was “not fussed” by the growth of Pink. He knew that’s how the business worked, and had divested from downward-trajectory brands for years, including The Limited, the one he founded, and the one that was supposed to be his legacy.

Anyway, do the executives running Victoria’s Secret get that the future of Victoria’s Secret is not Victoria’s Secret? They certainly understand the value proposition of a brand like Parade, and have the infrastructure to scale something up fast. Victoria’s Secret still operates close to 900 stores in the U.S., and could use that real estate to distribute Parade, making it far more accessible to a broader range of people. One thing all of fashion and retail has learned over the past few years is that acquiring customers online is often more expensive, not less. Pink scaled by filching bits of real estate in Victoria’s Secret stores until it got so big that it took over some of the stores. The same strategy could be employed with Parade.

Recently, Waters, the group C.E.O., promoted Greg Unis, head of the beauty division for the past seven years, to president of Victoria’s Secret and Pink. Waters has been in the picture for a good while, but he mostly ran the international division—one area of the business where Wexner kept a safe distance. While Unis hasn’t been around for as long, he is considered by many to be the “last vestige” of the Wexner regime. Whether or not that is a good thing is debatable.

Can we blame Bode for Kramercore? [The Atlantic]

Shein is suing competitor Temu for allegedly tricking “consumers into buying from Temu and/or downloading its mobile application,” by creating “fake” Twitter accounts through an “overarching scheme of counterfeiting, infringement, impersonation, gross and egregious data privacy violations and trade secret theft.” In turn, Shein is also asking Twitter to release “all undeleted data” connected to these accounts. Funny when the copiers get copied. [Sourcing Journal]

Not to give Chris too much attention (we all know Jason is the real star), but you should also listen to this How Long Gone episode with Philipp Plein. What a guy. [HLG]

Coach hosted a dinner at the Sunset Tower on Wednesday to celebrate its collaboration with Kirsten Dunst and illustrator Jessica Herschko—I got to sit between Everywhere Everything All at Once costume designer Shirley Kurata and Pamela Anderson’s stylist, Rebecca Ramsey: a dream. The conversation at our end of the table was mostly concerned with the strike(s), how the Met Ball used to be, and the perils of social media. Although I dare say there wasn’t a bad seating assignment: get a load of the celebs in attendance if you want a lesson in how to “curate” your branded dinner party. [W]

Dana Thomas launched a Substack! [The Style Files]

“Fashion is a ridiculous business. Sometimes, it feels like [Thom] Browne is the only one in on the joke.” [British GQ]

For those of you living in D.C., could this be true, and does Rent the Runway need to stage an intervention? [Twitter]

LoveShackFancy (the brand that can only be described as Shabby Chic but make it Gen Z fashion), is collaborating with The Gap. [Inbox]